ATLANTA -- The Braves’ postseason offense never found its footing, and the numbers tell a blunt story. Over seven playoff games, Atlanta hit .183, scored 22 runs and posted a .609 OPS. Against the Dodgers in the National League Division Series, those numbers dropped even further: .145 batting average, eight runs and a .501 OPS across four games.
That kind of October stumble might have felt familiar, but this one came with a twist. It wasn’t some isolated collapse that came out of nowhere.
The Braves had already spent much of the summer drifting far from the explosive group they were early in the year. Through the end of May, Atlanta ranked second in MLB in runs scored and third with a 109 Weighted Runs Created Plus, a measure that puts league average at 100.
Over the final four months, though, the club slid all the way to 28th among 30 teams with a 90 wRC+.
So the postseason fade was really just a continuation of the offensive slide that defined the second half.
There were a few individual bright spots in the regular-season stretch run worth separating out. Drake Baldwin battled through a rough return from a right oblique strain, missing about a month and then struggling for a few weeks afterward, but his 136 wRC+ after the break matched up much better with what he did over the first two months. Ronald Acuña Jr. missed most of June and July with a left hamstring strain, so he was not among the qualified players in the June 1-Sept. 27 sample, though he did post a 118 wRC+ after the All-Star break.
But in October, the lineup was mostly a dead end. Michael Harris II and Ozzie Albies were the only qualified Braves to finish with an OPS above .513.
Harris came in at 1.115 and Albies at 1.067. Sean Murphy did have a .933 OPS, but he appeared in only 12 plate appearances over four games.
The rest of the group was buried near the bottom of the postseason leaderboard. Among the 23 MLB players who have logged at least 20 plate appearances this postseason, the Braves occupy five of the seven worst spots: Austin Riley at .513, Eli White at .507, Matt Olson at .459, Acuña at .425 and Baldwin at .348.
That puts this October in some rough company within the franchise record book. There have now been 26 players who have posted an OPS of .515 or lower while getting at least 20 plate appearances in a single postseason for the Braves, and 21 of those names were on the list before this year.
Still, the team’s .609 OPS over 140 plate appearances or more was not the worst playoff offense in club history. That distinction belongs to the 2010 team, which finished at .477.
Maybe it wasn’t just Brooks Conrad’s fault.
The Braves have actually set a few offensive benchmarks in recent years, including a major league record in the regular season when they produced a .501 slugging percentage in 2023. But the October results haven’t matched that firepower.
That 2023 team managed only a .519 OPS in its four games against the Phillies. The 2003 club, with Chipper Jones, Andruw Jones, Gary Sheffield and Javy Lopez, finished with a .607 OPS against Kerry Wood, Mark Prior and the rest of the Cubs staff.
And that’s part of why this feels bigger than one bad week. Since 2022, the Braves are 5-12 in playoff games, and the postseason OPS numbers for the core of the lineup have reflected that slide: Albies at .792, Harris at .748, Olson at .641, Riley at .596 and Acuña at .555, for players with at least 40 postseason plate appearances in that span.
Riley’s October was especially frustrating. His homer off Phillies closer Jhoan Duran in Game 1 of the Wild Card Series stood out as the Braves’ best offensive moment in the postseason, but he went 1-for-19 with seven strikeouts the rest of the way, closing out the worst season of his career on a sour note.
Harris gave another reason to think his star power could keep rising, and Albies at least put some distance between his postseason work and the struggles that marked his second half. But the larger picture remains hard to miss: when the lights get brightest, the Braves have not hit like the team that terrorized pitching for much of the regular season.
The 2021 club handled that stage. The four playoff teams since then have only deepened Atlanta’s October problem.
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